I'm guessing this has been discussed before, but with the new initiatives on solar sails and ion propulsion drives, humor me anyway. As opposed to trying to...

Can someone think off the top of their head of suitable materials for use as reentry shielding/ external shell material that are compatible with either a fresh...

Hello Friends, There is plenty of energy on moons crust that if we can mine Helium 3 Gas out of Moons crust we can solve all our energy needs for...

Would it be possible to build one enormous single stage solid launcher and offset the cost of the quantities involved by the saving on the technological costs...

For those of you who may have read my article about planetary chauvinism "Somewhere Else Entirely" at http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/somewhere_else.htm, I...

I think I understand why objects heat up when going through the atmosphere and therefore why re-entry vehicles need heat shielding. My question is why we...

I've been wondering, just what is the minimum protection you can get away with and still be able to function effectively in a vacuum? Say you're breathing...

Why not any first stage with LH2/LOX before Delta IV? Maybe this is a dump question too but I have always wondered that: How much powerful Saturn 5 would have...

I was just glancing at some sites mentioning VASMIR plasma engines, and was wondering if the power source was nuclear (reactor or RTG?) or solar or some other...

I wonder if I could feed an off the shelf jet engine with fuel and oxidizer at a fuel rich mixture ratio and later add the rest of the oxidizer to the exhaust...

We know that beryllium heat sink heat shields can be fabricated and expected to work, based on the mercury program. The fabrication difficulties and weight...

A couple of questions on this space technology: 1)I was under the impression that carbon nanotubes, if manufacturable at reasonable lengths (~ a foot?) would...

Well, not having received any negative responses to my original query in sci.space.policy, concerning Virgin Galactic, here...

Meanwhile, over in a Mars discussion board, the question has been raised about whether one can clean garments during an inter-panetary mission, just by...

Thinking about the problem some more it seems a big problem would be landing a high speed glider onto a sled that is on tracks. This would mean that the sled...

Let's assume that SPS is beaming down microwaves at 900 W/m^2 intensity in a column of focused energy 10 km in diameter at a frequency of 2.45 GHz. The...

Hi What is the difference between Delta 4 and Titan III-type launch vehicles? IL of FI

I was wondering what communications protocols have been used in the past with probes traveling beyond the earth-moon system? I've read that G-tor was used for...

"Roger Stokes" wrote: I have read ideas of air-launched rockets gaining about 300m/s, but how about a rocket mounted on a maglev...

"Tony Rusi" wrote in the subject line for some reason "could we shine a laser on this new solar system and detect something in 180 years?" ...